If the man at the eye of the storm was at all flustered, he didn’t show it during the warmup for Friday night’s game at the Bell Centre against the Philadelphia Flyers.

P.K. Subban danced around the ice, played deft stick-and-puck games, chatted with kids in the crowd and generally carried on as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

Let coach Michel Therrien be the dour dude with the sour glower. Pay-Kah was as sunny as February in Jamaica. As well he should be. He earns US$9 million per year (roughly 327.8 billion in Canadian dollars) to play a kid’s game. He’s one of the top five defencemen in the NHL. Kids love him. The camera loves him. He’s young and rich and famous and he loves every minute of it.

You knew that’s how it would be when the Canadiens were back on the ice after last week’s tempest. It’s hard to pick a low point from a season that has been one continuous low point since the end of November, but if there is one, it’s probably Therrien’s post-game rant in Colorado, when he elected to single P.K. out for the loss.

It was a cheap stunt. Subban had lost an edge while trying to win a hockey game. The puck went the other way, captain Max Pacioretty gave up on his check and did his best impression of an innocent spectator who had wandered onto the ice, and Jarome Iginla put it in the net.

Therrien should have handled it in a professional and private manner. Going public made it seem like a personal vendetta against Subban, especially when Pacioretty was at least equally to blame: I’ll take a guy who screws up while trying to do too much over one who does too little any day.

Sadly, this is the way it has always been with Therrien and P.K. The coach coddles Pacioretty and David Desharnais to an absurd degree and rips Subban and a few others. Therrien was at it when he was a talking head on RDS, it has been this way through most of Subban’s career, and he’s still at it.

Subban handled the incident directly and he handled it well. “For me,” he said, “my numbers speak for themselves. If anybody wants to criticize my play on the ice, well, I tell ’em to look at the numbers. Look at the production over the last six years. Find me a handful of defencemen that have done what I’ve done in this league.

“I play for the crest on the front of the jersey, but if people want to be critical, they don’t need to say anything: just look at the numbers. That’ll shut ’em up pretty quickly.”

It should. It should particularly shut up a coach whose team is locked in a fog of his own devising, a coach who can’t seem to find the way out. This has been Therrien’s MO when he’s under pressure. Pass the buck, blame the players.

Therrien seems not to have learned from experience. He did the same thing with his entire Penguins team shortly before he was fired in Pittsburgh. Surely the lesson is, “say what you want to your team, but not with the cameras rolling.”

Either Therrien doesn’t learn, or he knows he’s on the way out and he doesn’t care. Either way, it’s impossible to see how this can go on beyond the end of this season. GM Marc Bergevin should have made a coaching change after those back-to-back losses to the Blue Jackets. It would be pointless to fire Therrien now, with barely more than 20 games left in a lost season — but it would be a colossal blunder to bring him back.

I hate seeing coaches fired, but when you treat your star defenceman as a convenient scapegoat for your own mistakes, you don’t deserve to stay.

With Subban and the Canadiens, the trouble goes beyond the coaching staff. The organization and the star defenceman have always been, if not at loggerheads, then at right angles to each other.

Even as he has become the most charismatic skater to wear the CH since Guy Lafleur, P.K. and the Habs have come to inhabit different worlds. There’s Planet P.K. and Planet CH and it’s rare that the two meet, from Subban’s independent charitable activities to the team’s selection of its captain. (And maybe the hockey gods were trying to tell them something when Bergevin and Geoff Molson went to the wrong house while trying to deliver the captain’s jersey to Pacioretty.)

On the ice, Subban gives you everything he has, mistakes and all. Off the ice, he goes his own way. It’s increasingly obvious the club doesn’t like it and it’s hard to believe Therrien would have pulled that stunt in Colorado without the tacit approval of his GM.

Nor is Therrien the only NHL coach who treats Subban that way. Media darling Mike Babcock clearly didn’t want the Montreal defenceman on his Team Canada squad and, once he was on the roster, barely used him in Sochi.

It’s the way of the modern coach, most of whom have the imagination of a turnip. Had Babcock coached Team Canada during the Summit Series, the games would have been dull as dishwater and Paul Henderson would be a forgotten man today. No one would remember where they were when he scored, because they would have been asleep by then.

Can the Canadiens and Pay-Kah coexist after Therrien is gone, as he surely will be as soon as this nightmare season is over? They may have no choice. Contracts the size of the economy of Martinique are tough to trade and you can’t let a player of Subban’s ability go without getting a comparable player in return.

Assuming a trade isn’t on the horizon, then, Bergevin has to find a coach who can get the most out of Subban at both ends of the ice, as Barry Trotz has done with Alex Ovechkin in Washington. If Ottawa coach Dave Cameron can work with Erik Karlsson, a defenceman so inept in his own end that he rarely sees action on the penalty kill, then someone can work with P.K. Subban, a massive talent who most definitely kills penalties.

Something has to give, because this can’t go on. It’s not good for Subban to be constantly in the coach’s doghouse, it’s not good for the team. As for Michel Therrien? Let him join that passel of ex-coaches on RDS, where he can rip his erstwhile superstar to his heart’s content.

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